STRATEGIC DEVELOPER: We need a universal canvas that doesn't suck - We're still only in the early stages of building a common Internet collaboration platform.

Like many of you, probably, I tire-kicked Google Spreadsheets when it first arrived on the scene, then forgot all about it. A nice bit of AJAX hackery, I thought, but no serious competition for Excel. I was wrong, though, and here's an anecdote that explains why.

At InfoWorld we report vacation days in the following way: Every quarter, the HR folks e-mail me a blank spreadsheet with one cell for each day in the quarter, I fire up Excel, type the letter V into each of the cells corresponding to a vacation day, save the spreadsheet, then e-mail it back. It's quaint, to say the least. But I'll bet that somewhere in your company, some equally quaint Excel sheet is …